Postmetaphysical Theology

Cameron Freeman, a member of the Integral Life website, has just published an essay on postmetaphysical theology in The Global Spiral, an online journal.  I will post an excerpt in this thread, and I invite you to read the whole essay here.

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Towards A Post-Metaphysical Theology

As Jack Caputo maintains in his award winning work on deconstruction and the Kingdom of God (The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, Indiana Press 2006), the God of metaphysical theology is a God that is well lost to the task of thinking, and so the challenge that faces theologians today is to think God in a way that is radically otherwise to the metaphysics of Being in the history of the West.

In undertaking the task of constructing a post-metaphysical approach to theology, then, this study will begin by turning to Jacques Derrida and his critical deconstruction of the Western metaphysical tradition from Plato to post-modernity. Derrida begins with the observation that in so far as the entities that constitute our reality have to be set apart before we can even begin to speak about them, nothing actually exists prior to this differentiating process.¹  This differentiation process that precedes and sets up the very conditions of language and meaning is what Derrida calls différance, which he characterizes as “the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences.”² As the dynamic structuring principle of language and communication, différance can also be described as the never constituted enabling condition of Western metaphysics³, and as such it describes the very ‘conditions of possibility' for distinguishing between metaphysical oppositions such as ‘sensible/intelligible', ‘nature/culture', ‘inside/outside', etc…

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DECONSTRUCTION AND THE QUESTION OF GOD

For many people, Deconstruction has commonly been framed as the latest refinement of the Nietzschian doctrine that ‘God is dead', the final nail in the coffin of the God of classical theism. At first this seems to be a valid interpretation, as the object of deconstruction is indeed the desire for wholeness, totality, unity, the desire for a perfect present, or the desire to make reality make sense and hold together. And traditionally this has been the role of the God of classical theology, characterized by Derrida as an “Author-Creator who, absent and from afar … regulates the time or the meaning of representation.”¹³ In this classical view the God of metaphysical theology acts as a transcendental signified, a stable center of pre-given truth, the conceptual ground of all temporal meaning that fixes the play of differences and where the meaning of Being is regulated by a theological obsession with univocal concepts.¹⁴  And as such, this classical theistic God-which is easily exposed by a deconstructive reading to be a merely human construction of power and privilege-is a prime candidate for Derrida's deconstructive reading of the Western tradition.

This basic recognition that the sought for foundation of all things is not univocal¹⁵, and that the ”archai are trembling”, however, is not necessarily a bad thing for theology. In fact, it is the central aim of this paper to argue that the deconstruction of metaphysics ultimately helps to open up a post-metaphysical space that yields the possibility for a new kind of theological language, a language that is rooted in the earliest beginnings of the Christian tradition. As Derrida states in pre-empting the overriding goal of this study, “the point would be to liberate theology from what has been grafted onto it, to free it from its metaphysico-philosophical super-ego, so as to uncover an authenticity of the ‘gospel', of the evangelical message. And thus, from the perspective of faith, deconstruction can be at least a very useful technique.”¹⁶

And so, by engaging the inherent instability of the deconstructive impulse and jettisoning the metaphysics of first principles, this paper will propose a way in which to re-capture the authenticity of the gospel message by re-constructing the enigmatic teachings of the historical Jesus that have been handed down to us in the sacred texts of the New Testament.¹⁷

For as Death of God theologian Thomas Altizer contends, “only a deep deconstruction of the language of the gospels could call forth anything echoing the original power of the parables…”¹⁸. And so once we relinquish the fixed certainties and securities of the meaning of Being in the history of the West, it can be seen that the parabolic teachings of Jesus that have been recorded in the New Testament gospels are not predicated on a ‘transcendental signified' or a ‘fixed center' of stable and unchanging meaning. And by showing how the parables of Jesus disrupt and confound the pre-given horizons of intelligibility that establish the metaphysics of Being in the history of the West with a direct pointing to his own realization of the Kingdom of God, it will here be argued that Jesus' radical teachings are so explosive precisely because they are not grounded upon the onto-theological foundations of the metaphysics of presence…

Read the whole article here.

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Cameron summarizes his argument in a blog entry on Integral Life as follows:

“So rather than providing a pre-packaged program of rules and procedures for admission into the Kingdom, the paradoxical strategy of Jesus disrupts the quest for cognitive certainty and call for a free movements of faith in the face of an impossible situation, involving risk, uncertainty and an openness to the unexpected that is grounded in a confession of ultimate not-knowing.

In contrast to the logical calculus and pin point clarity of an Integral Post-Metaphysics, an authentic faith commitment is “structurally blind” and takes root only when the road seems obscure and when the storm clouds of life buffet us, when we are overwhelmed, when we stumble, and fall, and yet still move forward in spite of all evidence to the contrary…

For just as Kierkegaard wrote, the “infinite passion of inwardness” (i.e. Christian paradox) has nothing to do with objective explanation at all, and as such the real journey only begins when forgo all metaphysical anchors, confess that we don't see directly where we are going… and THEN step forward with this passion for Not-Knowing.”

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Bravo! An integralite that understands Derrida and knows the “religious” significance of his work. Of couse Caputo, a scholar of religion and one of the author's sources, knew this all along. As did many, many other religious scholars, even those of Roman Catholic persuasion. Although the quest for Jesus' “original” teaching or intent is anti-thetical to the deconstructive endeavor, nonetheless the author's Derridaian interpretation of Jesus does indeed open us to a postmetaphysical “religious” experience. But it ain't got nothin to do with a spirituality apart from the mundane. This could've been written by our friend Greg Desilet and sounds a lot like his proposed “synergist spirituality” in this previous thread.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Not bad, though I have a problem with this phrase: “to re-capture the authenticity of the gospel message.”

To me this sounds a bit like, “we are going to find the real message of the gospel, the one and only true message, the essential message… etc.

I agree, though, that the historical Jesus people have uncovered an interesting image (which is one of several interesting images) of Jesus: Jesus as a kind of Diogenes, a Jewish Kynic as it were.

So… when you know someone named “John” well enough, you can refer to him as “Jack” in print, I guess, eh? :-)

I like Caputo's stuff. Ken should read more him ;-) (Yes, of course, Ken, I know: de Certeau's Heterologies is evil, mean-green-meme, nasty, relativistic, Boomeritis stuff.)

de Certeau's book on mysticism is a fascinating, and required, read.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Regarding the supposed basis of Derrida being the green meme and the so-called performative contradiction of his work, I like the following excerpt. It's strikingly similar to the way we previously discussed how Nagarjuna gets around the same charges of relativism and logical performative contradiction leveled against him in his time by use of the “emptiness of emptiness”:

“And since the formal logic of paradox-X is Y, just as Y is X-never constitutes a fixed center of meaning in accordance with the metaphysics of presence, this paradoxical pattern can be said to be a “non-fundamental” structure, or an “abyssal” structure. In this way, to the extent that it is a ground it is also without metaphysical grounding, or without a bottom. And of course, paradox is not itself the bottom of anything either. As a coherent framework of ultimate meaning that itself has no fixed meaning, it does not constitute a deeper, supra-essential origin of truth. If this paradoxical structure is said to ground origins, it must be added that it un-grounds them at the same time in a radical language from which can be best thought of as the “underlying matrix of an non-foundational dialectically structured universe.”

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Hi Ed,

Yes, I seem to remember an essay on differance – I think it is an addendum to the collection of essays on Husserl and signs – in which some interesting parallels between differance and emptiness emerge, on precisely this point.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Caputo has some interesting comments on the Un-Grund.

This concept comes to us from Eckhart ,through Boehme, and later Schelling. It implies a kind of anarchism, which is the basis of the kynic path.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Freeman notes that Jesus and Derrida use a “non-foundational dialectically structured” argument showing the interdependent relationship between any oppositional set. (Or dependent origination by another name. Or emptiness by yet another.) This is different than how formal logic sees that relationship. Hence what appears as a performative contradiction to the latter is due to its lack of such a “dialectically structured” perspective.

We can see how another author uses the same argument to show how Foucault might have answered Habermas' charge of the performative contradiction. The following is from Stuart Dalton (2008). ”Beyond intellectual blackmail: Foucault and Habermas on reason, truth and enlightenment.” E-Logos, Electronic Journal for Philosophy, pp. 6-9:

It is clear from The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that Habermas holds an unusually high degree of respect for Foucault's work. He devotes two lectures in the book to Foucault, while Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Bataille each merit only one; and much of what he has to say about Foucault is approving. He seems to think that Foucault, among the many voices that make up the philosophical discourse of modernity, has gotten closest to the truth. In addition, his rendering of the Foucauldian projects of archaeology and genealogy are admirably comprehensive and even-handed.

Nevertheless, Habermas never really confronts the “fundamental” issue that distinguishes Foucault's thinking from his own. This issue is the nature of truth and the nature of reason. He assumes throughout his critique that Foucault must necessarily share his understanding of what truth and rationality are like; he refuses to acknowledge that there may be at work in Foucault's critical project an understanding of truth and reason that is radically different.

Habermas argues that even though Foucault's various works reflect a subtle and progressive development, all of them still remain implicated in the same performative contradiction. This performative contradiction is assumed to arise when genealogy attempts to critique reason on the basis of a mere reversal of the traditional truth/reason dichotomy. But Foucault's understanding of truth and reason is, in fact, far more intricate and nuanced than Habermas has allowed. Foucault does not propose a simple reversal of truth and power; rather, he calls into question the very possibility of all such “simple” realities, relationships, and reversals. Habermas thinks of truth in terms of a clean, absolute dichotomy: one is either in the truth or in error; one either has truth as a univocal foundation or one is caught in a performative contradiction, (denying-comically-the very foundation on which one must stand in order to say anything meaningful). To be rational, for Habermas, is to recognize the purity of truth, the fact that truth can speak with only one voice, and that between truth and untruth there is a clear separation, an absolute abyss. But Foucault says that he considers all such simple and absolute dichotomies to be a form of “intellectual blackmail” (WIE 45, 42). For him, true rationality is not a matter of being absolutely “for” or “against” something. Rather it requires that one “refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative” (WIE 43).

Foucault is asking us to be more reasonable in our assessment of rationality. He is not suggesting that we turn our backs on truth-that we judge it to be a fiction, nothing more than one of the manifold effects of power. Rather, he is calling for us to own up to the fact that truth is not so pure and simple as Habermas (and others) would make it out to be; but that it is (always and already) inhabited by-among other things-relations of power. Habermas can think of truth and power solely in terms of a simple either/or dichotomy, and so he is only able to make sense of Foucault's discourse by reading it as a reversal of the terms: from “truth/power” to “power/truth.” But Foucault would denounce the second dichotomy-just as he would the first-as “simplistic and authoritarian.”

Instead of merely rearranging the terms of the dichotomy, Foucault wants to situate his critical thinking on the slash. “We are not talking about a gesture of rejection,” he says. “We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers” (WIE 45). The area of the “frontier,” I take it, is that space of possibilities that is both outside and inside the truth, the space that is “between” truth and untruth (as they have been handed down to us). Foucault denies that this space is a void or an abysmal breach. Rather, he considers it an area of fruitful interchange, where an honest critical attitude can find room to expand its borders. Instead of repudiating this space as a no-mans-land, Foucault embraces it as the welcome clearing in which possibilities abound. The critical attitude he calls for would no longer naively maintain that truth has dropped from the sky, with an immaculate purity that it manages to protect from all mundane relations of power; but neither would it consider truth to be so thoroughly contaminated by power that validity claims can no longer be made, and only an unchecked relativism prevails. Foucault calls for a rationality that has owned up to the fact that truth is always inhabited by untruth, that reason itself cannot escape the influence of unreason.

So it seems to me that Habermas was right when he said of Foucault: “perhaps I did not understand him well.”vii Habermas, in fact, appears determined not to understand Foucault on Foucault's own terms. Recasting Foucault's non-foundational arguments in the idiom and the logic of his own foundationalist discourse he (not surprisingly) finds that they fall short. The fact that Habermas is willing to stake his entire critique on the claim that Foucault implicates himself in a performative contradiction is indicative of the fact that he has not appreciated the subtlety of Foucault's “position” on truth and rationality. This “position” is a non-static position. Foucault does not stay in one place. Habermas looks for him in the only two locations where he thinks one can stand: with the truth or against it. But in fact, Foucault is not standing anywhere. He is in flight, operating a messenger service between truth and untruth, reason and unreason. To Habermas' eternal “irritation,” he presents a moving target; and the site of his movement is not one that Habermas can even get in his sights. That Habermas thinks he can catch Foucault in the clumsy net of performative contradiction indicates that he believes Foucault has settled down for good in a restful pose. He obviously does not recognize the slipperiness and subtlety of Foucault's fugitive “position” concerning truth and reason.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Derrida also talks about that “space in between” along the “border” (margin) in which “possibilities abound,” which is not a fixed position but like Foucault is a “fugitive” always on the move. For example this from ”Derrida's (Ir)religion: A Theology (of Differance)” by Ian Edwards, Janus Head, 6(1), Spring 2003, 142-153:

It would be easy to confuse differance, and its nameless place, for what is commonly understood to be God. God, unlike differance, signifies a metaphysical ground, or an “upon which” the eternal is placed. Yet, differance is neither eternal (nor sequential). There is no “upon which” anything can be placed. For the place is always shifting (moreover, the place is its shifting and vice versa). Since its indeconstructability is not due to a metaphysics of presence, it must emerge in the very spacing of what can be deconstructed.

What is necessary is to go back “behind and below” the origin:

“toward a necessity which is neither generative nor engendered and which carries philosophy, ‘precedes' (prior to the time that passes or the eternal time before history) and ‘receives' the effect, here the image of opposites (intelligible and sensible): philosophy. This necessity (khora is its sur-name) seems so virginal that it does not even have the name of virgin any longer” (Derrida, 1993, p.126).

Without form and name, differance is meaning-less. It is meaningless because it does not have any prescribed fixed boundaries; hence, what can happen within a boundary-less space is unlimited. It is here where Derrida finds a kinship with negative theology. Both deconstruction and negative theology, especially in the sermons of Meister Eckhart, attempt to assert what can not be asserted. They also, along with the thought of Georges Bataille, have a “passion” for what is “impossible.”

Despite their similarities, there are also a few notable differences. First, negative theology posits a godly-being who resides in a space prior to the purely existential mode of being. Deconstruction would not necessarily, in the conventional sense, pose an argument against the notion of a space that precedes the existential. However, it would have difficulty accepting a godly-Being. In the indeconstructable space, there is neither a being nor a non-being, but, according to Derrida/Caputo (1997), a certain “quasi-condition” within which both are inscribed (p.103). Second, negative theology takes on a certain view that directs its gaze toward that which is above, i.e., it is always looking toward the transcendental, or mystical. Deconstruction has nothing to do with mysticism. (Yet, both mysticism and deconstruction exceed the boundaries of philosophy). They differ in that deconstruction does not to speak of anything that is transcendent (It could be argued that the khora is somewhat of a transcendent function). It prefers to speak of differance, the possibility and impossibility of whether or not the indeconstructable space, the khora, can be avoided.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Here are some descriptions of the difference between formal operational and dialectical thinking by Michael Basseches in ”The development of dialectical thinking as an approach to integration.” Integral Review, June 2005, pp. 47-63. These can be applied to what I've been emphasizing above. He says:

Formal operational thinking as described by Piaget can be understood as efforts at comprehension that rely on the application of a model of a closed system of lawful relationships to the phenomenal world. In contrast, dialectical thinking can be understood as consisting of efforts at comprehension relying on the application of a model of dialectic to the phenomenal world. These latter efforts may be termed dialectical analyses, in contrast to formal analyses. I am suggesting that dialectical thinking is an organized approach to analyzing and making sense of the world one experiences that differs fundamentally from formal analysis. Whereas the latter involves the effort to find fundamental fixed realities - basic elements and immutable laws - the former attempts to describe fundamental processes of change and the dynamic relationships through which this change occurs (51-2).

I think the dialectical analysis has a power that is absent in the formal analysis. At the same time, the dialectical analysis can make use of the power provided by the formal analysis. Marxian economic theory may make use of the classical economic theory's clarification of the laws of human economic behavior under capitalism but also analyze the potential and actual transformations of those laws. Kuhnian analysis can make use of philosophical clarification of the rules of evidence employed within the paradigm that dominates a discipline, while simultaneously analyzing historically how that paradigm achieved hegemony and where it is likely to confront its limits (54-5).

The organizing principle for formal operational thought is the structured whole, or system. In contrast, the organizing principle for dialectical thinking is the dialectic. If we equate the notion of form in the definition of dialectic with that of structured whole or system we see how the concept of dialectic builds upon, but is more complex than, the concept of system. Dialectic refers to the developmental transformation of systems over time, via constitutive and interactive relationships.

Thus, whereas formal thinking is systematic, dialectical thinking is metasystematic. In formal operational thought, an underlying (closed) system organizes a logic of propositions into a coherent whole. It enables the thinker to deal systematically with various propositions and their necessary interrelationships. It also makes possible the analysis of phenomena that can be effectively modeled as comprising closed systems. But the closed-system model is not adequate for problems requiring analysis of (1) multiple systems and their relationships to each other, or (2) open systems that undergo radical transformation.

In contrast, in dialectical thinking, an underlying model of dialectic organizes a logic of systems into a coherent whole. It enables the thinker to deal with various systems and their relationships to each other over time dialectically. The model of dialectic does provide a basis for analysis of (1) multiple systems and their relationships to each other, as well as (2) open systems that undergo radical transformation (56-7).

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Another good reference on postformal dialectics is a forum discussion at Integral Review based on Gary  Hampson's article ”Integral re-views postmodernism” in Issue 4, 2007. That forum discussion has since disappeared from the Review but I copied-and-pasted several posts from it to Open Integral. They can be found at the following links: Postformal Dialectics Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Martin Matustik comments on Habermas' limitations, from ”Towards an integral critical theory of the present age,” Integral Review, Issue 5, December 2007:

[Habermas'] social evolutionary model stops with formal stage of communicative rationality and neither allows for postformal stage of consciousness (read: individual, social, and cultural) development nor for nondual postformal states of awareness….The postformal model of human evolution is, like Habermas's, based on a reconstructive social science, yet unlike Habermas, it theorizes experience and claims of individuals who already today develop stages and states of consciousness beyond formal rationality (230-31).

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Sometimes when I write on the polemical angle or rhetorical angle of spiritual discourse, I get the response that that those things are just “political” asides –as if there is some “pure” spiritual teaching bereft of rhetoric and polemic! This, to me is a kind whore/madona way of looking at spirituality. Its either all whore (Adi Da, etc.) or all madona (Ramana, etc.) This, to me, is ridiculous and naive.

“Just look at those pictures of Ramana,” they say. “Such purity, without the hint of artifice….”

        
Ya, right!  It the above ain't the pose of “the one who knows” I don't know what is!

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Hey,

On 13.11 when Balder began this thread his original post included the following excerpt from a blog by Cameron Freeman: ”…as such the real journey only begins when forgo all metaphysical
anchors, confess that we don't see directly where we are going… and THEN step forward with this passion for Not-Knowing.”

Later (15.11), Edward posted a lengthy quote from Ian Edwards on Derrida's (ir)religion from Janus Head, (always a good peruse–only wish Integral Review and Co. had the same
sense of grace and intellectual aesthetic). But the quote that appeared here was cut short before reaching the part that really ties these two pieces together in a way I think provides the best possiblities for entertainment. The part of the Edward's essay to which I refer reads:

“In Derrida’s “apocalypse without apocalypse” there is always a call of that which is impossible, as opposed to the postulation of mere possibility. The impossible is the very necessity of deconstruction. It is the untruth that all truth runs up against. It is the very boundary of what can appear as presence. Deconstruction asserts that all phenomena are supported by their being impossible. The impossible does not negate a (phenomenological) investigation. On the contrary, it facilitates it. The results of deconstruction become more fascinating because they are always unexpected; hence, an unexpected result is not even (a result). (There is no end in sight.) Without an end in sight, an apocalypse is not“seen” as coming; therefore, an unseen apocalypse is always an “apocalypse without apocalypse.” There is always a shock when an apocalypse announces itself unexpectedly. It is akin to an unwelcome guest arriving at your door. You ask yourself, “At this time?” “Right now?” It disrupts present time, it reveals presence as always open to transgression. Because presence is always open to transgression, an apocalypse (that comes) is invisible, or unforeseen. So, to know that an apocalypse is coming or to see it just around the corner is impossible. It is not possible to know for sure whether or not some-thing will arrive. In the end, nothing is certain, not even the end itself. Rather than being distraught over the impossibility of certainty, of truth, or of end, the impossibility of limitation should be exalted and pursued with passion. The fact that we do not know what is coming, or if anything will ever come, leaves us with one possibility, the only possibility that can hope the (im)possible, faith.” (pp 145-46)

Both of these essayists write of the “passion” that can accompany entry into pure, unending ambiguity. Are these guys twins seperated at birth or do they just both get off reading Kierkegaard? Neither one of them referenced the other or named the other in their biblography. I'm suspicious.

But I found it interersting that Edwards wrote of jettisoning the illusion of truth as a act of (im)possible faith. At first I was skeptical but then I realized that my own writing on Ambiguity as Paradice contains a certain kind of gambler's faith. For example the last two graphs from a blog entry called ”No Reason to Believe:”

“So how does one know there is no need to believe. “How do you know when,” she (Marianthi) asked me last week and hinted she already knew.

It is without doubt when one catches themselves preening a little like an old cat, looking that way at the world, catching the taste of a sense that no matter how long the delicious free falls through the abyss that come the bottom, if it comes, one will land on their feet. Will it hurt? Who knows. But its safe until then.”

That's about faith, no?

In the next little excerpt from an earlier ”To One in the Dark V,” I'm again talking faith, she not so much.

“Now Nelson and Jennings duet on “A Whiter Shade of Pale”. This wise woman and I are still wondering why anyone would ever hem around themselves with the slightest thread of a belief; risk any possibility for the hopeful illusion of the order of things.

She says something like, “When you are going out there, like standing right on the event horizon or even on the other side where you can’t see and there is nothing else…it gets pretty scary. That’s when things start to fall apart inside, all the structures.”

“I think one thing stays,” I say, “that knowing you can handle it.”

“Maybe,” she says, “but for me, all I know is that it’s so right.”

This wise woman….”

***

Is the passion for that Paradice greater when there is no faith whatsoever? I would think so. Can it be done? I hope.

Is the passion for that Paradice greater when there is no faith whatsoever? I would think so. Can it be done? I hope.

Perhaps if it can be demonstrated then these guys will stop writing aboug Postmetaphysical spirituality and theology as if they were writing something new instead fabricating a currently novel jargon to document the same old tired search for the redemptive truth.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Hi Nickeson,

Thanks for yr input here. To answer your query, no I have not read Ian Edwards (or Janus Head), although I have browsed Derrida's Irreligion, and may have gleaned something from this text. More likely though is the Kierkegaard connection, for while there are no references to Kierkegaard in my paper I do love this singularly passionate individual, and have studied his works pretty extensively.

I like the quote you mentioned, and would simply put it this way: if you can see it coming, it's not it… The apocalypse (or the Kingdom) arrives 'like a theif in the night', it comes as THAT which we did not see coming, it is radically unexpected and structurally unforeseeable… and interrupts every pre-supposed horizon of meaning or anticipation…

So when it comes to matters of “faith, hope and love”, my position here is that we simply “do not see directly” what it is that we have faith, hope and love in… Or a Kierkegarrd said, the authenticity of ones inward passion (or faith) is inversely proportional to its objective certainty… That is, Faith is only real when we trust in the incredible, Hope is only real when everything is hopeless, and Love is only real when we love our enemies…

It sounds like you have no taste for that “same old tired search for redepmptive truth”… and while I appreciate how this can liberate one from those obscene super-ego injuctions that can stem from the need/search for redemption, I would simply add: the impossible happens… and often when we least expect it…

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Theurj,

Wow! I really appreciate this kind of feedback and elaboration, it sounds like we’ve travelled a lot of similar territory here… it is a rare privilege to find someone with real expertise when it comes to matters post-metaphysical. In response to your posts:

1) Yes, the quest for Jesus' “original” teaching or intent is indeed anti-thetical to the deconstructive endeavor, and this is a genuine cause for poise. The search for a ‘lost Origin’ is precisely Derrida’s critique of Heidegger (and others) and it needs to be taken seriously.

 My position on this question is that there is an “original voice-print” to be discerned in the parables Jesus – the paradoxical ‘deep structure’ wherein the lost are saved, and the saved lost. But it must be kept in mid that this is a “re-construction”– and so it is best to speak not of the “quest” for the historical Jesus (which closes off interpretation and suggests a final destination) but of our “reconstructions” of Jesus that must be done over and over again in different times and different places, by different groups and different communities, and by every generation again and again an again. So my claim is that this is the best available re-construction of the historical Jesus in the wake of the deconstruction of metaphysics in post-modernity.

Also, as I’m sure you are aware, the deep structure I have uncovered here is NOT a metaphysical origin or ground – it is a post-metaphysical infra-structure that is structurally open to unexpected reversals, re-configurations and the unforeseen novelty and surprise that comes with Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of God.

2) You say that this paper “ain't got nothin to do with a spirituality apart from the mundane”. I have to reply that it is precisely the mundane world that Jesus puts into question with his paradoxical reversals of meaning – i.e. these paradoxes break open the ordinary everyday economy of the world, the run-of-the-mill way of doing things… The parables express the logic of Grace, a logic that flies in the face of conventional worldly transactions… Caputo calls this a “sacred anarchy” and has written extensively about how Jesus’ Kingdom interrupts and de-stabilized the mundane world, if you like you can check out The Weakness of God for more on this…

3) Although I am a big fan of Foucault, I did not know that this post-metaphysical approach shows how Foucault might have answered Habermas' charge of the performative contradiction. Foucault indeed wants to undermine the distinction between truth/falsity or reason/madness that Habermas is presupposing… So yes indeed, “We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers” (WIE 45)… the space that is “between” truth and untruth (as they have been handed down to us).And yes, this space is not a void or an abysmal breach, but rather an area of fruitful interchange. Thank you for this…

4) True, we should be careful not to confuse differance, for what is commonly understood to be God, as a metaphysical ground “upon which”  the eternal is placed. There is a lot of debate going on here about the relation of deconstruction and negative theology, and my own view is that Derrida is wrong to characterize negative theology as positing a “super-essential godly being”… In my view negative theology neither affirms nor denies such as God, but seeks that space that is beyond both affirmation and denial. And this take on negative theology is pretty close to Jesus’ paradoxes which also refuse all such logic of affirmation/negation (and the metaphysics of presence). Butv there is scope for debate here…

5) And I very much like your post (and links)on the key difference between formal operational and dialectical thinking. This reminds me of the distinction Hegel made between Understanding and Reason. The Understanding holds to fixed determinations while Reason is properly dialectical and synthetic. It also speaks to Ken Wilbers distinction between formal-operational rationality and vision-logic.

The question for me here is that I am not convinced that these dialectical tensions ever reach any kind of “proper Hegelian resolution”. So Hegel’s Aufhebung (transcend an include) is the most problematic part of his philosophy for me. I think we simply must learn to live with paradox, endure the tension between opposing pairs, see how they these opposing tensions can bleed into each other, but not necessary seek an imaginary peace beyond the pull of these contradictory tensions… I may be wrong here, but if there is an Aufhebung, I’m pretty sure it contains within it the seed of a new dialectical tension, and without end…

6) Yes, Habermas' social evolutionary model stops with formal stage of communicative rationality, and this is a significant limit to his understanding of human evolution. I think Ken Wilber has also mentioned this… Habermas simply cannot see that there is a post-formal (rational) stage of consciousness development (probably because there are so few people moving into this structure-stage), and this probably goes a long way toward explaining his agnostic or atheistic bent.

Again, great food for thought and many thanks for your valuable feedback on this paper – there are so few people doing post-metaphysics, but I’m convinced that the future of philosophy and theology depends of these kinds of interactions. Kind regards,

Cameron

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Apocalypse, now?

“I love the smell of postmetaphysics in the morning…”

When I said that it is a spirituality that is not apart from the mundane I was differentiating this type of “nondual” insight from those that see it as a clean dichotomy (the more “formal” view). I call the latter “dual nondualism.” In the latter we have as you note the reverse, a mundane world that sees things apart from the spiritual. In that sense I agree with you. My reference was to the deconstructive nondual wherein both spiritual and mundane are co-“infected” to the point on inseparability. In that sense it is a spirituality that is not apart from the mundane.

When I reference the dialectic it is not of the Hegelian variety. I too think that the search for a “higher synthesis” is, like the above, part of that formal way of thinking. You can find much discussion on this in the links I provided on Postformal Dialectics preserved at Open Integral. That discussion was primarily between me, Gregory Desilet, Gary Hampson, Daniel Gustav Anderson and Bonnitta Roy.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

“You can't handle the truth!” –Colonel Jessep (played by Jack Nicholson) in A Few Good Men.

Here's a funny, incisive article by Caputo called “What would Jesus deconstruct?” from “the global spiral.” It's a play on Charles Sheldon's oft-repeated phrase “What would Jesus do?” I've quoted some excerpts below:

Imagine Jacques Derrida running in the steps of Charles Sheldon, or maybe just out there jogging alongside him down some country road in turn-of-the-century Topeka. That is a bizarre image, unforgivable really, and I beg the forgiveness of everyone concerned: of those who love the question “What Would Jesus Do?”-I love it too, although I am also afraid of it and think it is a very tricky two-edged sword-and of my deconstructionist friends, who are appalled to see me associate deconstruction with the politics of rural Kansas and a question that has been condensed to bumper-sticker simplicity. What gives me the courage to go on is that in both Jesus and deconstruction forgiveness enjoys pride of place and that the most perfect form of forgiveness is to forgive unforgivable offenses, like the one I here propose to commit. I pin everything on the hope that we have all done something we are ashamed of and no one will have the courage to cast the first stone.

…quoting Nietzsche is the best way I know to clear a room of evangelical Christians.

With that in mind, let us revisit Sheldon's opening scene….What would Jesus do-if he ever showed up some Sunday morning? Turn things upside down. The last would be first, the meek and poor would inherit the earth, the hungry would be given good things, and the rich would be sent away empty (Luke 1:53). Do you think he would bring peace? No, not peace, but the sword. Would he preach “family values”? No, he advocates hating father and mother for the kingdom of God. Instead of being confirmed in our ways and congratulated on our virtue, we would stand accused, looking for the log in our own eye rather than the sliver in the eye of the other. “Jesus is a great divider of life,” Sheldon says (In His Steps, 113).

Mark C. Taylor once famously described deconstruction as the hermeneutics of the death of God. But in the view I am advancing here, deconstruction is treated as the hermeneutics of the kingdom of God, as an interpretive style that helps get at the prophetic spirit of Jesus-who was a surprising and sometime strident outsider, who took a stand with the “other”-and thereby helps us get a fix on Sheldon's sometimes slippery question. In my view, a deconstruction is good news, because it delivers the shock of the other to the forces of the same, the shock of the good (the “ought”) to the forces of being (“what is”), which is also why I think it bears good news to the church.

In a deconstruction, our lives, our beliefs, and our practices are not destroyed but forced to reform and reconfigure-which is risky business. In the New Testament this is called metanoia, or undergoing a fundamental change of heart. Our hearts are turned inside out not by a vandal but by an angel or evangel of the truth, the truth that we say we embrace but that now, up close, looks ominous, frightening, ugly, and even smells bad. What if the truth smells bad? What if the poor, who are blessed in the kingdom, do not have the opportunity to bathe regularly? We sing songs to the truth as if it were a source of comfort, warmth, and good hygiene. But in deconstruction the truth is dangerous, and it will drive you out into the cold. Nietzsche had it right when he said we lack the courage for the truth, that the truth will make us stronger just so long as it doesn't kill us first. We want the truth attenuated, softened, bathed, and powdered, like the smarmy depictions of Jesus looking up to heaven found on the covers of some editions of In His Steps.

On my reading, which will sound a little too pious to impious deconstructors and downright impious to good and pious Christians, deconstruction is a theory of truth, in which truth spells trouble. As does Jesus. That is what they have in common. The truth will make you free, but it does so by turning your life upside down. Up to now, deconstruction has gotten a lot of mileage out of taking sides with the ”un-truth.” That is a methodological irony, a strategy of “reversal,” meant to expose the contingency of what we like to call the “Truth,” with a capital T-deconstruction being a critique of long-robed totalizers of a capitalized Truth, of T-totallers of all kinds. I have no intention of sending that strategy into early retirement or claiming that it has outlived its usefulness. We will need that strategy as long as there is hypocrisy, as long as there are demagogues pounding on the table that they have the Truth, which means forever. Indeed, I will not hesitate to make use of that strategy here. But I do want to supplement it with a complementary theory of truth. For while deconstructors have made important gains exposing the hypocrisy of temporal and contingent claims that portray themselves in the long robes of Eternal Verity, it is also necessary to point out that deconstruction is at the same time a hermeneutics of truth, of the truth of the event, which is not deconstructible. This is the truth that disturbs and that we tend to repress. When a deconstruction is done well, the truth or-what seems like the same thing-all hell will break out. What the truth does, what this Christlike figure in Sheldon's novel does, or their contemporary counterparts in The Wire do, what Jesus does, is deconstruct. Sheldon's famous novel, this classic of popular Christian piety, the one with the smarmy picture of Jesus on the cover, turns on a-hold your ears-deconstruction. Jesus Christ, Deconstructor!

That is why the church is “deconstructible,” but the kingdom of God, if there is such a thing, is not. The church is a provisional construction, and whatever is constructed is deconstructible, while the kingdom of God is that in virtue of which the church is deconstructible. So, if we ask, “What would Jesus deconstruct?” the answer is first and foremost the church!

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

As to the charge of relativism, Caputo says the following in another “the global spiral” article titled “Radical hermeneutics matters all the way down”:

By “radical hermeneutics” I mean a theory of radical interpretation, and by radical interpretation I mean that interpretation goes all the way down, that there are no uninterpreted facts of the matter that settle silently at the bottom that can be unearthed by patiently peeling away the layers of interpretation. To say that interpretation matters all the way down is not to say that “anything goes;” it is simply to recognize that we are not God. The charge of “relativism” thrown up against theories of radical interpretation is a confusion and an obfuscation. “Relativism” is a red herring used by the God-and-apple-piety crowd; it does service for thinking when the discussion gets too complicated.

When it is rightly framed the debate about interpretation matters is not between “relativism” and “objective truth” but between conditional and unconditional understanding. True understanding is never unconditional, but always a matter of finding the right conditions under which understanding can take place-like possessing the complex preconditions involved in understanding an ancient language and a long gone historical context. Understanding is always interpreting, and to interpret means to locate and acknowledge the relevant presuppositions. Absolutely unconditional understanding means understanding under no conditions. Just so: Under no condition is this possible: we are not hardwired to assume an absolute standpoint. We are not omniscient eternal beings outside every context. We are not God, but what Soren Kierkegaard liked to call “poor existing individuals,” people who pull on their pants one leg at a time. Understanding always has a point of view, otherwise it has no point and it has no view.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
And did they get you to trade
your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
a walk on part in the war
for a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl
year after year
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.

–Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here”

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

From Deconstruction in a Nutshell, Derrida and Caputo, Fordham UP, 1997:

When presented with a neat distinction or opposition…Derrida will not, in the manner of Hegel, look for some uplifting, dialectical reconciliation of the two in a higher thing, a concrete universal, which contains the “truth” of the first two. Instead, he will look around…for some third thing which the distinction omits, some untruth, or barely true remnant, which falls outside the famous distinction, which the truth either separately or both together fails to capture, which is neither and both of the two.

In the Timaeus, the missing third thing, a third nature or type-khora-is supplied by Plato himself. Khora is the immense and indeterminate spatial receptacle in which the sensible likenesses of the eternal paradigms are “engendered,” in which they are “inscribed” by the Demiurge, thereby providing a “home” for all things. Khora is neither an intelligible form nor one more sensible thing, but, rather, that in which sensible things are inscribed, a tabula rasa on which the Demiurge writes. This receptacle is like the forms inasmuch as it has a kind of eternity: it neither is born nor dies, it is always already there, and hence is beyond temporal coming-to-be and passing away; yet, it does not have the eternity of the intelligible paradigms but a certain a-chronistic a-temporality. Because it belongs neither to the intelligible nor to the sensible world, Plato says it is “hardly real.”

Like pure being, or pure nothingness; both and neither (84-5).

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Cameron also has a website. The following are excerpts from some posts called “Post-metaphysical musings.”

From Part 1:

The basic problem with an IPM is that its Kosmic address system is still metaphysical because constitutes the grounds by which God or Being may enter into the domain of knowledge. In other words, an IPM pre-determines the conceptual horizon in which Spirit is allowed to show up and therefore forecloses on the true mark of the Mystery as an event that arrives as a Gift, as an event that tends to disrupt any pre-supposed horizon of truth and meaning…

In other words, in so far as the indexing system of an IPM permits the objectification and subordination of God to human conceptualization (AQAL), it reflects the hubris that wants to encompass everything within the limits and possibilities of ordinary, descriptive representational thinking…

And so while IPM succeeds in formulating a calculus of perspectives for the manifest world that no longer ascribes to any “fixed center of the universe”, it still remains within the metaphysical desire to have God at it's disposal by rendering ultimate reality intelligible in terms of the distinctions and conceptual categories of ancient Greek thought.

From Part 2:

My own approach to post-metaphysics (see the Source Code blog on this site) calls us to live with paradox - the creative tension between opposing perspectives. And since paradoxes are un-objectifiable (i.e. structurally open to Not-Knowing) and since they have no “fixed center of meaning” they refuse to be pinned down by the rational accounting of metaphysics (including an Integral Post-Metaphysics) which is still deeply conditioned by the traditional assumptions that underpin the rational-scientific demand for evidence and the quest for cognitive certainty.

To draw out the key difference between Ken Wilber's IPM and Jesus' paradoxes we can briefly refer to the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss who famously argued that “in every system of myth we will find a persistent sequence of binary discriminations as inside/outside, up/down, one/many, followed by a ‘mediation' of the paired categories thus distinguished.”

This description of myth is a perfect description of what Integral theory claims to do. That is, the basic contours of Integral theory perform the same specific task of reconciling or mediating opposites. The conviction that ultimate reconciliation is possible is the heart of all mythic religion, so much so that more important than the proposed solution itself (religious or philosophical) is the belief in the possibility of a solution…

Now, the opposite of myth (i.e. a story that reconciles opposites) is paradox which creates contradiction and dissonance where previously there was seamless certainty, bringing not peace but a sword.

So where Mythic consolations (e.g. the AQAL co-ordinates of an Integral Post-Metaphysics) establish a world, Paradox subverts this world with a story deliberately calculated to show the limitations of myth, and shatters its presupposed categories so that its relativity becomes apparent…

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Steven,

I'll call your Eliot with Blake.

The Argument

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

Then the perilous path was planted:
And a river and a spring
On every cliff and tomb:
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth.

Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.

Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility,
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

–William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

kela mentioned de Certeau above. Jerome McGann references him in relation to Blake in ”Contemporary poetry, alternate routes”:

As Michel de Certeau and others have pointed out, narrative is a form of continuity; as such, its deployment in discourse is a way of legitimating established forms of social order, as well as the very idea of such established forms. Within discourse structures, critical alternatives to the orders of narrativity characteristically emerge from various types of nonnarrative and antinarrative. Such forms have grown especially prominent in the discourses of postmodernism. As we shall see more particularly in a moment, however, while both nonnarratives and antinarratives move counter to regularized, normative, and “accommodating” orders, they exemplify distinct forms of discourse. Antinarrative is problematic, ironical, and fundamentally a satiric discursive procedure. It engages a dialectic, and its critical function is completed in a structure of antithesis, which may include the double irony of a self-antithesis. Nonnarratives, on the other hand, do not issue calls for change and alterity; they embody in themselves some form of cultural difference. To adapt (and secularize) the terminology of Blake, nonnarrative is the “contrary” (rather than the negation) of narrativity. Its antithesis to narrative is but one dimension of a more comprehensively imagined program based in the codes of an alternative set of solidarities. Byron's Don Juan is one type of antinarrative and Blake's Milton is another type. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, on the other hand, is decidedly nonnarrative.

Nonnarrative is different–for example, Blake's “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Among all of Blake's works it most closely resembles the Songs of Innocence and of Experience in terms of both its ideas and its form. Both works explore the significance of what Blake calls “contraries.” Furthermore, both are collections of diverse materials anthologized structures where the relations between the parts are not determined by narrativities. This odd character of the “Marriage” in particular is underscored in several ways. The work opens with an “Argument,” which ought, by poetic convention, to be a brief summary of the work to follow. But the “Argument” is a small narrativized unit whose relation to the rest of the “Marriage” can only be arranged by the reader's ingenuity in drawing different kinds of verbal and tropical analogies of the “Argument” (and parts of it) with other parts and pieces of the work. The “Marriage” contains as well a number of other brief narrativized units, but all are self-contained; their interrelations, once again, have to be consciously constructed because the work as a whole is not organized as a narrative.

One should note here that a similar indeterminacy of textual relations is found throughout Blake's work: no copy of the Songs has an order which corresponds to that of any other copy; and variations are the rule in almost all of his engraved works. There is no doubt that these variances in sequencing are deliberate, and there is every reason to think that he was encouraged to this kind of textual experimentation by recent biblical and classical scholarship.

What, then is the order which pervades a work like the “Marriage?” Blake called it the order of Imagination-the order generated through the faculty or process which discovers previously unapprehended relations of things. The most striking aspect of the highly differentiated material in the “Marriage” is that it encourages the reader to draw out unusual substantive and grammatological relationships which convention will normally miss or avoid. Antinarrative calls those conventions into question and develops the premonitory conditions for imaginative activity. Indeed, antinarrative frequently generates imaginative localities and incommensurate particulars which escape the imperialism of narrativity. But nonnarrative alone will establish, among the kingdoms and principalities of narrative, the proper world of what Blake called Imagination.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Or, to sum up in digest form, this from David Punter writing in The Literary Encyclopedia:

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell can be seen as a kind of treatise on how to think beyond confining limits, on how to value energy and excitement and not to be restrained by conventional patterns of thought. If it speaks in its title of a “marriage”, the reader is nonetheless at liberty to question whether this marriage will necessarily be a smooth one, and whether what is really at stake here is an eternal battle between order and chaos, between reason and energy, between social constraint and imaginative freedom.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Here's another digested analysis, making my point that Blake is doing what “Jesus would do.”  From e-notes:

Throughout the work, Blake presents a series of contraries-Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil, Angel and Devil, Reason and Energy-but then appears to reverse the traditional values associated with each term, thus celebrating Energy, Evil, and even Satan himself. Most critics today reject such a reading as simplistic and insist that, rather than merely inverting the terms of the contraries, Blake was questioning both terms and exploring the limitations of each.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Balder,

Thanks for introducing us to Cameron's work. It is obviously resonant with many of my own thoughts. Since your introduction though you have not made any comments, even when Cameron himself responded. Just not interested?

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

I'm sorry, Edward (and Cameron!).  I actually have been intending to participate in this thread more, since I also resonate with a number of Cameron's thoughts.  I just need to take some time to put thought into a contribution to this thread – Derrida's work is not as familiar to me as it is to you two – and I haven't had much time.  My work load this quarter is quite heavy and I haven't been able to keep up with all of my Gaia interests.  But I'll put up something soon!  

I appreciate all you've been contributing here, Edward.  I've been reading this thread (and other ones) and have benefitted from the personal thoughts (and excerpts of others' thoughts) that you've shared with us so far.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Edward,

This latest turn in this thread has urged the almost always irrepressible part of my curiosity to check back into Blake after I had uncharacteristically repressed that option since I don't know when–at least high school. I guess I never really thought highly of the 18th Century except for the rhetoric of St. Just and the artwork of Goya.

But here are a few thoughts:

1. Reading Blake in relation to the current postmetaphysical exegesis of the Parables presents a fascinating little irony. While Jesus delivered these bits of wisdom while working as a Man-God, he has since been promoted into semi-retirement as a God-God and here's what Blake has to say about them:

“And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.”
                                                 (From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)

Thus, when you write “Here's another digested analysis, making my point that Blake is doing what 'Jesus would do,'” isn't the devilish Blake actually penning your sub-text to read, “…Blake is doing what Freeman and Caputo and I would all do?” Blake makes Jesus the Middle God-Man in this situation where he does almost nothing for the scale of the tribute due him.

2. Somewhere some famous Englishman wrote that Blake was the greatest of all English artists. To me that sounds like being damned with faint praise. He seems more like an inspired and talented illustrator (though a bit of a one-trick pony) who followed a consistent subjective agenda. The same can be said of Norman Rockwell. (While Blake did Heaven and Hell, Rockwell stuck with the plane in between.) If Blake had been a Continental I doubt if he would have ever escaped the shadow of Goya, his almost exact contemporary.

3. Reviewing, after all these years, the Blake works, he strikes me as characteristic of one, who in these days would declare themselves to be a member of the Reforming Church of the Spiritual but Not Religious, (S. But Not R.) a sect that has no fundamentalists to speak of, but has its full share of fanatics–the two are not always the same. I think Blake would fall into the latter category with a fanaticism that drove his careers as a visionary illustrator and author of second-rate poetry. Likewise, one can examine K. Wilber under the same light and note that his obsessive drive to rationally prove that Spirituality is not a superstition inspires his writing of second rate philosophy. I think if KW surrendered his title as a philosopher and took up one as an Evangelist of the S. But Not R., his stuff would seem actually authentic and go down a lot easier, at least with me it would. His work might not bear any closer on reality, but at least it would fit within a coherent context.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

“…Blake is doing what Freeman and Caputo and I would all do?”

Yes, I'm interpreting Blake here to fit in with my Freeman-Caputo agenda. Whether that was Blake's original intention or agenda is moot. However other critics have also seen this more general “postmodern” influence in Blake, so it's not merely my personal agenda.

As to Blake's aesthetic merits I can only say it's a matter of personal taste. I never cared much for him either; I just used him to fit my agenda. However it is interesting to explore the historical, cultural and philosophical contexts in which his work was created.

PS: Pink Floyd, however, not only fits my agenda but I find them extremely aestheically pleasing in music, lyrics and performance.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

PS: I realize Blake's historical period was well before what later came to be called the postmodern. So obviously the latter ideas did not influence Blake but rather the reverse. Certain trends had already begun in Blake's time that latter evolved in the pomo of  Derrida and company.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

For example, here's an article by Renato Barilli called “William Blake at the origins of postmodernity.”

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Thomas Carlson has a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge UP, 2003) called “Postmetaphysical theology.” Here are a few excerpts from pp. 59-60 that highlight what Cameron was saying about even AQAL falling prey to the myth of “descriptive, representational thinking”:

“Marion structures his theological critique of metaphysics according to the poles of ‘idol' and ‘icon,' which, within Marion's quasi-phenomenological treatment, define two distinct modes of visibility for the divine, or two ways of apprehending the divine. In the idol, the divine comes into visibility only according to the prior conditions and limits of the human subject's intentional consciousness; therefore, within the idolatrous mode, my vision of the divine proves to be an indirect or invisible mirror of my own thinking, thus obfuscating the definitive otherness and incomprehensibility of the divine. In the icon, by contrast (and here Marion's debt to Levinas runs deep), the visibility of the divine would irreducibly precede and therefore exceed the conditions and limits of any intentional consciousness; in the iconic mode of vision, therefore, I do not constitute the divine in its visibility, but rather, through a radical reversal of intentionality, I am first envisaged and thereby constituted by a divinity whose otherness exceeds my intention and comprehension.”

So what then is the “praxis” for getting outside of idols into icons? This from p. 58:

“Marion's core theological vision is shaped most decisively by the “divine names” theology and “mystical” theology found in the late fifth- or early sixth-century writings of Dionysius the Areopagite (or the Pseudo-Dionysius).”

Ironically-and how fitting that irony would play into my postmodern turn-I left the study and practice of a “divine names” Order in the lineage of the Pseudo-Dionysius (via Plotinus, Proclus and Iamblicus) for “integral” because I thought it was a retro-romantic regression into pre-rationality. However that is only the interpretation in the context of an integral still attached to its own representational mythology. For example this from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Pseudo-Dionysius:

“The most controversial and arcane passages of the Mystical Theology revolve around the mystical as taken in itself and not as the act of negating the other forms of theology. Dionysius says that after all speaking, reading and comprehending of the names ceases, there follows a divine silence, darkness and unknowing….He speaks only of [the] ‘union' with the ineffable, invisible, unknowable godhead.”

In other words, there's no head like godhead. (Sung to the tune of “there's no business like show business.”)

As to my pseudonym, “theurj,” I've explained elsewhere that it is a diminutive of the name I took upon entering the Order, based on the word “theurgy.” The encyclopedia entry explains thusly:

“Dionysius is practicing [emphasis in original] forms of theological meditation in the sense that the earlier Church Fathers had understood this, not as a type of objectified, academic knowledge, but rather as a more complex, intersubjective form of address, communication and contemplation. Dionysius adopted the word theurgy, “god-work,” together with theology, “god-word,” to describe the inmost reality of this practice, adopting it from the later Neoplatonist understanding of a hidden sympathy or interconnectedness between material things and the sacred, divine significances resident in them by virtue of divine power. Iamblicus, for instance, had denied that pure thought or contemplation could bring about union with the divine. What was crucial was the performance of certain ritual actions or theurgy….for some modern critics…[this is] analogous to calling the Christian sacraments 'magical'….But Dionysius does not understand theurgy this way. For him theurgy is the consummation of theology, which is to say that God's activity within all the orders of nature does not abolish nature, morality, contemplation, or science but rather completes them and makes possible the divinization of human nature.”

Dionysius does not, like Iamblicus, see theurgy as apart from theology, or the “doing” as apart from the “thinking.” Or a separation of the dual aspects as we've been discussing above but rather their relation. And again, the whole project is not to bring one to a fixed, certain idea (or idol, in Marion's terms) of this relation but rather, as the encyclopedia goes on, to 1) reverse the usual hierarchy like in the parables of Jesus and 2) understand how this dynamic tension is itself the key to the “kingdom of God”:

“If we say God is good, we run the risk of thinking we know entirely what we mean and consequently closing off a thought that has to be radically open-ended, if not altogether subverted. If we liken God to a worm, we subvert our own comfortable tendencies by being shocked into filling the image with enquiry. So the Psalmist who uses the worm image hides the sacred from those who would defile it with a lack of understanding and yet points to the sacred in a new way. This constant tension or dialectic between hiddenness and openness pervades the whole of Dionysius' meditative practice of theology, and from this perspective Dionysius' practice of writing is a complex and necessarily deceptive or subversive process of reading the encoded insight (or contemplation) in created things in such a way that neither the perceptual beauty of the material thing nor the deepest hidden beauty of the sign becomes a trap, an idol, or a vanishing point but, instead, an activity that opens up an irresistible beautiful world in and to God.”

Granted the author turns around and negates his own (anti)thesis by describing God as “irresistibly beautiful.” But perhaps, like Robert Palmer sang it, it was “simply irresistible.”

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

“Dionysius is practicing forms of theological meditation in the sense that the earlier Church Fathers had understood this, not as a type of objectified, academic knowledge, but rather as a more complex, intersubjective form of address, communication and contemplation.”

Bingo!! But of course, this kind on “practice” can only ever be mere translation. ;-)

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Edward,

This might start out as a sort of discontinuous ramble but somewhere down this order of words there might be a thought relevant to this thread and this pod.

1. Start with the article by Renato Barilli about Blake and postmodern art. I thought it was an inventive little piece of the kind that an editor of an obscure, up-start academic journal asks one of his friends to write “…you know, just throw something together off the top of your head, don't worry about footnotes. We need to fill some space.” It was not the kind of article that lays out sound evidence to prove a point or two but each paragraph seemed designed to draw fire and create conversations. I was half-way through the 'graph describing how Blake was a sui generis progenitor of Abstract Expressionism when I had to ask myself “Hasn't this guy ever heard of the Baroque?” England never had a Baroque period until Blake came along well after the trend had died on the Continent. Blake's work far more resembles a degenerated adjunct to the framework created by the paintings of Caravaggio, the sculpture of Bernini and the lithography of de Beaugrand than any of the Abstract Expressionists' work resemble his. (Note: You have just finished reading the kind of paragraph that in itself serves as an example of the kind of paragraph it describes.)

2. But what was most interesting about this article was that it stands as an example of how postmodern theory and study occasionlly (more often as it ages) shoots itself in the foot. The article appears in a now inactive journal called McLuhan Studies and thus had to conform to McLuhan's idiosyncratic definition of Postmodernity, which does not generally conform to any other definition, but is entirely reasonable in the technical/social domain of media and communication theory–print media is modern, electronic media is postmodern. Very near the beginning of the article Barilli tries to imply that since Blake was alive at the time of the first accidental observation of activity in an electromagnetic field (though he had been dead several decades before Maxwell wrote his four famous synthesizing equations) that Blake was a postmodern artists. Now, I really like skyhooks, but the more audacious they are, the more subtly they have to be presented. This one was not subtle and by that lack not only failed but put skyhooking in a very bad light, which I personally resent. More than that it tipped the hand of some postmodern students by betraying the dictum that only local narratives are valid. McLuhan and his people occupy a very well bounded locality and Barilli was trying to see how far it could be universalized. He seemed to forget that postmodernists have to be more like particularizing quantum physacits than synthesizing astrophysacits. Still I had to appreciate Barilli for taking a shot at making Blake postmodern and maybe if one takes the dialectic one step further, also attempting, by self-exasmple, to postmodernize postmodernity by turning a betrayal into a field breakthrough…ya know whaddimean?

3. Then by drawing a line paralell to #2 through the postmetaphysical theology of Freeman and Carlson (and by extension this thread and this pod)  I find myself  just as uncomfortable with their work (as presented here) as I am with Barilli's, maybe more so because media theory, and art history and criticism are things one can easily walk away from come the five o'clock bell, theology not so much. Throughout all the Freeman/Carlson examples posted and referenced, I cannot help but think they are not only betraying postmetaphysics, but their own visions by describing them in any detail at all.

Though he can write at one point, ”and as such the real journey only begins when forgo all metaphysical anchors, confess that we don't see directly where we are going…” (this strikes me as only half a betrayal), Freeman precedes that with: ”My own approach to post-metaphysics…calls us to live with paradox - the creative tension between opposing perspectives.” which to me sounds every bit as much as a descriptive orientation and map of a journey as the stuff of Wilber that he is critiquing. If one develops a method and means and theology around a statement about not knowing where one is going, then they have a good idea of where they are going.  Carlson's “iconic mode of vision” is of the same order.  I have to wonder if one can write any positive statement about postmetaphysical theology or spirituality that doesn't both betray the perspective and the vision it reveals.  (And doesn't that betrayal transform that order of words into a negative statement?) Maybe the only valid statements on those two matters are statements saying what they aren't, what the author didn't envision, what the author isn't doing.  Forty years ago (more or less) I had a perspective-shattering vision of the liberation of insignificance and ambiguity which still I retain in vivid memory and traces of samadi. Whenever I have described that vision, in positive language,  it has been written off by others as nihilism (from my perspective within it, that is unimaginably far from its reality) and some people have even hinted that it was a little bit mad or was leading in that direction.

4. On May 12 this year Freeman posted a blog essay about Foucault and madness that concludes with the now almost cliche line by Deleuze and Guattari about the madman no longer having to be afraid of going mad. I have long thought that spirituality and theology were, and always will be, metephysical stops against madness and the fear of those not there of ending up there. If postmetaphysics is going to be valid then one might have to seek becoming mad; lose the fear and take the step. There is reason to think that genetics are the only real stops against insanity and are the only things that can be tested. The center will either hold or it won't.  For some it might reveal there is no such thing as the center and for the others it could show that the center is the only valid locality. Either way it is a liberation…nihilism rules.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is' is.” -Bill Clinton

I sympathize with this sentiment. I made much the same case when discussing Nagarjuna, that he asserted no view of his own but merely negated every view.

Now recall that Nagarjuna was also accused of “shooting himself in the foot” with this performative contradiction. On the one hand he says that he asserts no logical view of his own, that he makes no positive statement or thesis. Yet his critics said that is making such a statement he's doing exactly what you're noticing about pomo. But as Dalton above defended Foucault of the same charge by Habermas, your argument does not accept Foucault (or Derrida or Freeman) on his own terms. And those terms can make very tentative, contingent, “positive” statements about “what it is,” as long as that “is” isn't a fixed center. It then makes a certain kind of sense that there is no fixed center for all contexts but that each context does indeed have a center, or a “valid locality.” And there is a frameless frame for understanding this in accepting the ever shifting and sliding interplay of paradox.

Another point Dalton made, that I support with Basseches, is that Habermas more specifically, and the performative contradiction in general, is based on either/or formal logic and that holding a dialectical, paradoxical tension of the kind described above is post-formal reasoning. I know you have some problems with that but I think it has empirical validity and goes a long way to helping us understand the difference.

I think this is exactly what Cameron argues, that when everything is turned upside down without a fixed center to hold on to we enter divine madness. But it is only considered mad or insane by those that hold to fixed centers of certainty. If one settles into an acceptance of radical contingency then one can paradoxically find that center of any context or view that is applicable to its particular circumstances and live within that ever-shifting frameless frame.

If I may degenerate into an analogy, this is exactly what I learned in my martial arts training. For years I practiced specific exercises, specific forms, specific structures. And time and again I heard comments like the following: “But if you just practice how to block and counter-attack that specific punch/kick, for that specific stance, form and direction etc. then you're not preparing yourself for the ebb and flow, the unusual angles and bastardized forms etc that occur in a ‘real-life' fight. But paradoxically that's exactly what the training does, as I've had “real fights.” And they weren't pictures of “perfect” form, posture or execution. But that training indeed prepared me with a contingent “center” that could apply to the local situation with the appropriate techniques and even my own on-the-spot, bastardized accommodations.

And I can make the same comparison to dancing. And language. You use the rules and structures of language yet create unique and aesthetic expressions that apply it to specific, local contexts, each of which is different yet still holds to some “center.”

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Edward,

I had some difficult following your line of thought through the last post so I have to apologize for not making clear enough the discontinuous nature of my ramble. These two statements:

“…this article was that it stands as an example of how postmodern theory and study occasionally (more often as it ages) shoots itself in the foot.” and

“…tipped the hand of some postmodern students by betraying the dictum that only local narratives are valid.” are horses of the same merry-go-round–

but this one: ”For some it might reveal there is no such thing as the center and for the others it could show that the center is the only valid locality.” is not.  I think a bit of a disconnect between us happened when they were read together.

I'll go back to the first two. I was writing here about the tendency of some pomo scholars, in trying to create a broader structure for the pomo perspective…a natural enough inclination…violate the integrity of local narratives. The example was that McLuhan's definitions of postmodernism work very well within the domain of media theory, but they are a little absurd when it comes to narratives within art history. And that was more or less the end of that specific train of thought.

Next: While I can see where my statement: “I have to wonder if one can write any positive statement about postmetaphysical theology or spirituality that doesn't both betray the perspective and the vision it reveals.” can be read with in a slant toward Nagarjuna's assertion that seemed a performative contradiction, it was not written with anything like that in mind. I was not writing about only negating every view. Instead I was writing about the incredible difficulty in expressing a spiritual or theological vision in a language that lacks the vocabulary that would enable expression in anything other than metaphysical terms, which kind of dilutes the phrase “postmetaphysical spirituality” to something more or less like “almost not superstitious.”

So regarding formal reasoning, perfomative contradictions, postformal reasoning, etc. I agree with you and Dalton. That formal reasoning is a almost always eclipsed in the realms of fun and profit by postformal operations is as clear as day. I have rebelled against the adulation of formal reasoning every since the first algebra course I was forced to take. Except in working out communication problems where the English language is inconsistent, and balancing my check book, it has a very small place of respect in my life. All of which leads me to say that while I have never read more than a sentence or two of Foucault, that if and when I ever do, I will never accuse him of making a performative contradiction…it is such a wuss argument. And I will take him and Derrida and Freeman on their own terms because they all make sense in their own terms.

But that doesn't mean those terms are mine or that I won't use theirs as a springboard for expressing mine which includes writing that from a perspective outside of Freeman's terms he appears to be doing the same thing that he criticizes Wilber for doing (and betraying the postmetaphysical perspective and his own vision) because the words “calls us to live with paradox” fixes an “address system (that) is still metaphysical because (it) constitutes the grounds by which God or Being may enter into the domain of knowledge.”

Further Freeman writes in his blog : ”And so while IPM succeeds in formulating a calculus of perspectives for the manifest world that no longer ascribes to any 'fixed center of the universe', it still remains within the metaphysical desire to have God at it's disposal by rendering ultimate reality intelligible in terms of the distinctions and conceptual categories of ancient Greek thought.” And from my perspective outside of Freeman's terms his simple word “paradox” whether or not it constitutes, as you say, an ever shifting and sliding, frameless frame, is the equivalent of this purely metaphysical IPM and, additionally it falls into the ever-so-not pomo or postmetaphysical category that Rorty called “Redemptive truth.” Here is his definition:

“I shall use the term ‘redemptive truth’ for a set of beliefs which would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves. Redemptive truth would not consist in theories about how things interact causally, but instead would fulfill the need that religion and philosophy have attempted to satisfy. This is the need to fit everything—every thing, person, event, idea and poem –into a single context, a context which will somehow reveal itself as natural, destined, and unique. It would be the only context that would matter for purposes of shaping our lives, because it would be the only
one in which those lives appear as they truly are. To believe in redemptive truth is to believe that there is something that stands to human life as elementary physical particles stand to the four elements—something that is the reality behind the appearance, the one true description of what is going on, the final secret.”

For another example of the same thing, you wrote: ”If one settles into an acceptance of radical contingency then one can paradoxically find that center of any context or view that is applicable to its particular circumstances and live within that ever-shifting frameless frame.” To me that sentence expresses a metaphysical address and seeks “to end…the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves.”

Perhaps the main reason for the disconnect between our last two posts is the word “center” in the sentence: ”For some it might reveal there is no such thing as the center and for the others it could show that the center is the only valid locality,” which you might have read in light of what Freeman wrote about “the fixed center of the universe.” But they are two different things. 

What I was referring to as “the center” was that personal hypothetical characteristic that still holds together even if the consciousness has surrendered itself to oblivion in a fully crazy-making environment. Some people will find they have no such thing. They will drift into madness, maybe divine, but just as likely an infinitely repetitive, schizophasic conversation with a wall. Here I agree with Foucault (from what I understand reading about his theory regarding madness) and with R.D. Laing, there is significance in this state despite its lack of general distribution. There might be as much significance, and of the same kind, as I ascribe to theology and spirituality: a shield against the force of universal and entropic insignificance and perpetual ambiguity. But if one can remain generally unfazed by a fully conscious and unshielded tenure in that insignificance and ambiguity, then the hypothetical “center” is holding and for those who find shields inimical to the sweet life, they might choose to see their center (where ever it may slip or slide) as a unique and singularly inexpressible, incomprehensible shade (the presence of which can only be known by its absence) and they might choose to act as if it is the only valid, though still not redeeming, locality.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

What the hell?

The following was forwarded to me so I forward it here. I don't often do this but it might prove amusing, if not relevant.

HELL EXPLAINED BY CHEMISTRY STUDENT

The following is an actual question given on a University of  Washington chemistry mid term.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's  Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

“First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, “It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,” and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell
is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore,
extinct……leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting “Oh my God.”

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED AN A+

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Since you used Rorty's critique, I'm providing a link to an article that discusses how one might accept Rorty yet still posit a postmetaphysical “transcendental.” I've only skimmed it briefly and have yet to read it slowly and thoroughly, so I'll reserve comment for later. From the quick skim though it seems to deal with many of the issues we've discussed here. This is from “Neopragmatism and the Christian desire for a transcendent God” by Hendrik R. Pieterse:

“In this paper, then, I will risk a dialogue with Rorty's neopragmatism precisely around the possibility of construing transcendence in such a way that it honors the Christian demand for God's 'otherness,' while in doing so it not take leave of history, contingency, and finitude. This dialogue will be threefold: First, I assess Rorty's understanding of religion and its quest for transcendence. Second, I argue that Rorty's construal of transcendence is too restrictive, prompting him to unnecessarily throw the theological baby out with the metaphysical bath water. Finally, I present briefly the contours of a postmetaphysical understanding of God's transcendence that respects Christianity's need for God as genuine Other, but that at the same time takes seriously Rorty's emphasis on history, contingency, language, and time.”

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Gavin Hyman also questions the same dichotomy as Pieterse, only used by Vattimo. He says in “Must a post-metaphysical political theology repudiate transcendence?” (JCRT, 8:3, 2007):

Gianni Vattimo's recent book, Nihilism and Emancipation (2004), is written in the wake of what might be characterized as the predominant philosophical “event” of the twentieth century: the demise of metaphysics. For Vattimo, one corollary of this demise is that it is now impossible to articulate a critical standpoint independent of the cultural context within which we are embedded. For such an attempt could only be made on the basis of some “first principle” or foundation which would enact a fall back into metaphysics….My response is not to advocate a flight back to metaphysics, which would be as undesirable as it is impossible, but rather to question the very dichotomy with which Vattimo presents us. Does a turn away from metaphysics necessarily condemn philosophy to thoroughgoing immanence and the descriptive and sociological status that Vattimo claims it does? Or is it possible to conceive of an uncoupling of those frequently married concepts: metaphysics and transcendence?

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

That looks interesting, Edward.  Worth a read.

Alan Malachowski, a Rorty scholar, recently (within the last year or two) wrote an essay called “Paradoxes of Transcendence in Time-Space-Knowledge,” looking at some of these questions in relation to TSK.  I have looked for this essay online, to quote here, but I don't think it's available.  I may type up some excerpts from it later, when I have time.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Edward,
Thanks for the chemistry lesson and for posting the Pieterse essay. The following are notes on the latter.

1. Speaking of the language with which we all have to struggle, I have yet to read any of Rorty's prospectuses for the neopragmatic, humanistic and secular semi-utopia that couldn't be imaginatively construed as at least a quasi-metaphysical Transcendent Other.  This leads me to think that if it taken to its best illogical conclusion my argument against postmetaphysical spirituality that is based on the inadequacy of language would reduce down to: The only valid positive statement that can be made about postmetaphysical spirituality is “I don't know that;” four words that would also be the only valid negative statement that could be made on the issue too.  This would work well for launching the phase of Rorty's benign neglect of metaphysics and theology, but is would certainly put a lot of professional thinkers and talkers out of work. 

2. I have often thought that Rorty's non-secular utopia is as alienating and dehumanizing as the Christians' Kingdom of God, or Wilber's Kingdom of the Third Tier or any other kingdom that promises to be the best of all possible situations for humanity through the elimination of __________ (fill in the blank with the name of your pet ruination). And just as often I have wondered if Rorty was really committed to that vision only because he didn't want to be included along with Baudrillard on every Important Person's list of famous nihilists. Important People pay attention to the brighter atheists but always write off nihilists–even those of genius–as “just a nihilist.” (I am not sure, but didn't Nietzsche write that the true nihilists were those that would deny humanity anything other than the fullest living experience in the moment, or something to that effect?) In this light, I appreciate Rorty's preference for benign neglect over the aggressive atheism of Hook and the Four Horsemen of the Bright. The lazy agnosticism of an indifferent “I don't know that” can be far more devastating to metaphysical theology than a rant by a skeptical atheist in both function and form for an aggressive atheist is a true believing metaphysician in the same sense that the teetotaler, co-dependent, enabling spouse of an alcoholic is an alcoholic.

3. This sentence from Pieterse strikes me as one of the more important ones in the essay:

“But a postmetaphysical theology must resolutely eschew the “metaphysical comfort” of what Dean calls an “older historicism,” which, while acknowledging the ever-changing realities of history, time, and contingency, nevertheless argued that “beneath the change there was a structure impervious to the vicissitudes of time and perspective and that the thinker’s job was to introduce that structure into present history as faithfully as possible” (Dean 1988:4)” 

if for no other reason than to highlight Ken Wilber's work as an example of what must be eschewed.

4. Despite all its limitations, I have a great appreciation for the English Language for when it comes time to give a close reading to a paragraph it can present a word that literally cries out for examination and deconstruction in the extreme. For example, this from Part III:

”Construing God’s otherness in the way I have prohibits interpreting transcendence as either a generic quality of the divine life or as a static, ontological relation between eternity and time. Rather, God’s otherness is always the function of the normativity of power within a concrete historical context. This makes the Spirit’s otherness radically contextual. Because ineluctably insinuated in the power relations of a particular historical context, God is always “situationally transcendent,” to borrow Jerome Stone’s felicitous phrase. The Spirit’s transcendence—her gracious ability to bring liberation and healing—is thus a fragile and vulnerable performance; indeed, it is as fragile and vulnerable—even fickle—as the historical contexts within which the Spirit is insinuated.”

The word is “insinuate.” No longer can the more imaginative theologians say, “Behold the miracle, prima facie evidence for the existence and glory of God!” But the postmetaphysical theologian writes, “Imagine the contextual, fragile and vulnerable possibility of liberation, inferential evidence of the insinuation of God….”

This from Dictionary.com: “In-sin-u-ate: 1. to suggest or hint slyly. 2. to instill or infuse subtly or artfully, as into the mind.”  The word is derived from sinuous (1. having many curves, bends, or turns; winding. 2. indirect; devious.) which comes from sinus (1. an abnormal passage leading from a suppurating cavity to the body surface. [syn. fistula]). Insinuate, what a great word to use in Pieterse's context, it fits perfectly. But is this word, in its full existence and glory, the word he really wanted to use here? I think there is something about both the word and the context that inadvertently (perhaps) speaks from a background of decay.

5. Given all of its limitations I am frequently exasperated with the English Language for when it comes to finding a noun that requires pinpoint specificity, it fails. For example: “shade.” The other day I wrote this at the end of a post–”...for those who find shields inimical to the sweet life, they might choose to see their center (where ever it may slip or slide) as a unique and singularly inexpressible, incomprehensible shade (the presence of which can only be known by its absence) and they might choose to act as if it is the only valid, though still not redeeming,locality.”

 I spent at least one-half hour trying to find a name for the presence that I had located as the “center.” Actually my first impulse was to use “shade,” both in its more or less archaic usage as a ghost, and as something that dissolves when cast upon by light, such as the light of consciousness. But it seems to have too many other meanings as well. I wanted something more restricted. But I did not want a word that came directly or indirectly from any psychological lexicon…too scientific. I thought of “trace” as in something left behind by a now absent presence, but trace has other pomo connotation. And I did not want anything that carried any spiritual baggage or significations…too spiritual. So I I checked “shade” in Roget's International Thesaurus, to see if it contained a substitute, but found the definition I was using listed as a synonym in both the psychological and the spiritual vocabulary as both fields are bound together through the Greek word Psyche. And since “shade” sounded like the most distant cousin of each branch in that particular family, “shade” was what I set down.

But here in Part III of this essay, when all is boiled down, Pieterse's God and my shade could be used almost interchangeably. Sometimes I think–screw the English language, I'll only use Spanish from here on out…even in North America.

But more importantly I have to ask, is this what God has come to–the scraps of a degraded antique that a few thinkers keep around for sentimental reasons? Is it just the divinization of anything that gives one pause in a relative state of awe?  Something like that will never have the strength to earn its own keep. What both Pieterse and I were writing about, which he in true spiritualistic fashion reduced to God, I wanted to portray as a complex, functionally ahistorical, almost indefinable, genetically wrought, felicitous arrangement of neural pathways and synapses.  Are they worthy of awe? Of course. Do they deserve the name God?

I don't know that.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

96 degrees, in the shade
real hot, in the shade.

–Third World

Speaking of the shade, Derrida used the word “spectre” (among others) for that postmetaphysical (quasi[moto?])transcendental that was neither here nor there.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Pieterse says that Rorty, in his critique of metaphysics, maintains the same framework of logical positivism used by the metaphysicians. The latter indeed posit God as a foundational absolute beyond time and space, beyond humanity. But Rorty merely reverses this hierarchy in a purely relativistic, immanent, human-oriented pragmatism. As we discussed above, it’s still within the confines of the formal operational dichotomies of either/or thinking.

Postmetaphysics then might be defined as no longer using this type of logic but rather what we’ve come to describe as a postformal dialectic. This though is not of the Hegelian variety wherein the poles are “integrated” via a higher third thing. Rather, as Pieterse says, this “requires a different logic.” It is one in which there is a continuous, dynamic tension between poles that is always changing from moment to moment. Thus while there is no fixed, purely absolute center there is a center nonetheless.

Even saying this though appears to set up another either/or dichotomy in that we have absolute fixity (transcendence) on the one hand and relative contingency (immanence) on the other hand. But that way of framing it is exactly what Pieterse, Hyman, Derrida and others question. Within the type of dialectic above we can have both that aren’t really either but some combination thereof in that dynamic tension and interplay. So even transcendence and immanence interplay and neither are purely one or the other but both are “contaminated” by each.

This is where Pieterse redefines what we mean by “God.” God is no longer the Absolute other apart from humanity is some foundational “heaven” apart from earth. He does this by using the word “spirit” as that which is within each context, each situation, so that it is a “situational transcendent.” Here again paradoxical wording is the only way we can communicate this relation in our language, which by its nature separates subjects from objects. And indeed this spirit is much like the shade or spectre and even in religious parlance, the holy “ghost.” It never really enters as a definitive “presence” or “subject” but rather lies in that space in between, the khora, which presupposes both the intelligible and the sensible in this relation.

Hence Pieterse’s descriptions of spirit:

“The Spirit is not a self-subsistent, static entity that exists apart from its coinherence with other living beings.” “Understands the Spirit’s work in adjectival rather than nominative terms.” “God’s reality is coterminous with its instantiations.” “…function of the dynamic relational interplay between text and interpreter in a concrete context.”

So in this sense I don’t see this type of transcendental position as positing a definitive “address” or location, at least not in the fixed sense that “god” always resides at One Heaven Lane. It is also a redefinition and recontextualization of the word “transcendence” as well as “god” in that it is not one in dichotomous opposition to the other, as in transcendence/immanence, god/man. But Steven has a good point in that why continue to use the same words likes transcendence or god? Why try to redefine them in a postmetaphyical way instead of just coming up with new terms that reflect this revelation? If one point of this neo-Christianity is the “lure of new modes of being” (and language), why use the same, tired words that have so much metaphysical baggage? Indeed, “do they deserve the name God?” Or transcendence? For example, Derrida’s re-spelling of différance really does make a difference in this regard.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

I appreciate your reflections here, Edward.  There is a resonance with what you are saying in some progressive forms of Catholic theology, where God is described as the open, present/retreating “horizon” of being – not a fixed absolute, not inhabiting a fixed transcendental address.

Some of the questions you (and Steven) raise have also been on my mind.  With this post-metaphysical, deconstructive turn, it is also not clear to me why one would still try to keep things “anchored,” for instance, in the teachings or person of Jesus Christ.  Unhinging spirit from a fixed, metaphysical absolute, do we not also unhinge it from fixed historical referents?  Why hold on to the Biblical narrative, re-use it, re-interpret it generation to generation, instead of just moving on?  I'm not suggesting that no good reason to continue to do this can be offered, only that it isn't clear to me what it would be.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Edward,
You wrote: Pieterse says that Rorty, in his critique of metaphysics, maintains the same framework of logical positivism used by the metaphysicians.

I'm pasting below more of the Rorty essay I posted Sunday last, I do not think it sounds like it was written by anyone given over to metaphysical logical positivism:

“I hope that what I have said so far has given some plausibility to my thesis that the last five centuries of Western intellectual life may usefully be thought of first as progress from religion to philosophy, and then from philosophy to literature. I call it progress because I see philosophy as a transitional stage in a process of gradually increasing selfreliance. The great virtue of our new-found literary culture is that it tells young intellectuals that the only source of redemption is the human imagination, and that this fact should occasion pride rather than despair.

“The idea of redemptive truth requires the conviction that a set of beliefs which can be justified to all human beings will also fill all the needs of all human beings. But that idea was an inherently unstable compromise between the masochistic urge to submit to the non-human and the need to take proper pride in our humanity. Redemptive truth is an attempt to find something which is not made by human beings but to which human beings have a special, privileged relation not shared by the animals. The intrinsic nature of things is like a god in its independence of us, and yet—so Socrates and Hegel tell us– self-knowledge will suffice to get us in touch with it. One way to see the quest for knowledge of such a quasi-divinity is as Sartre saw it: it is a futile passion, a foredoomed attempt to become a for-itself-in-itself. But it would be better to see philosophy as one our greatest imaginative achievements, on a par with the invention of the gods.

“Philosophers have often described religion as a primitive and insufficiently, unreflective attempt to philosophize. But, as I said earlier, a fully self-conscious literary culture would describe both religion and philosophy as relatively primitive, yet glorious, literary genres. They are genres in which it is now becoming increasingly difficult to write, but the genres which are replacing them might never have emerged had they not been read as swerves away from religion, and later as swerves away from philosophy. Religion and philosophy are not merely, from this point of view, ladders to be thrown away. Rather, they
are stages in a process of maturation, a process which we should continually look back to, and recapitulate, in the hope of attaining still greater self-reliance.”

While I do not have access to any direct refutation of what Pieterse claimed of Rorty's lack of post formal operations, I think that the sophistication of thought presented in the preceding three paragraphs would be implication enough to show that Pieterse's claim is a little ingenuous.

You wrote: It is one in which there is a continuous, dynamic tension between poles that is always changing from moment to moment. Thus while there is no fixed, purely absolute center there is a center nonetheless.

The poles, transcendence and immanence, contaminating each other, shifting, sliding–the shifting, sliding “center” between them–are just blue smoke and mirrors, agitated puffs of air called words. The only center I can say I will ever recognize is my own don tien which just might be harboring some sort of shade, a material function of the psyche that has the inherent capabilities of keeping me from madness in this naive, delicious  free fall through existential nothing.  Everything else is the abyss as far as I know…blue smoke, mirrors and words sent out by others to grab for them at straws.

You wrote: This is where Pieterse redefines what we mean by “God.”

And I ask, like Tonto asked the The Lone Ranger in that classic joke, “Whaddaya mean 'we,' White Man?”  ;-)

You condense Pieterse's descriptions of Spirt down to this: “The Spirit is not a self-subsistent, static entity that exists apart from its coinherence with other living beings.” “Understands the Spirit’s work in adjectival rather than nominative terms.” “God’s reality is coterminous with its instantiations.” “…function of the dynamic relational interplay between text and interpreter in a concrete context.”

The same could be said for the cat that lives here with us in this house.

And Balder writes: “…where God is described as the open, present/retreating “horizon” of being – not a fixed absolute, not inhabiting a fixed transcendental address.”

All of us, the cat, M and I can be decribed as the foreground and mid-distance as well as the horizon of being. None of us is a fixed absolute either, nor do we inhabit a solid, transendental address. So I sit here with my peers, the Cat, M and God the Spirit. I ask God the Spirit. “Can you taste this fine beef stew, this incomperable rum?” I hear nothing. I ask, “Can you feel the silk of this woman's skin?” I hear nothing. I ask, “What good are you  anyway?”

I hear nothing.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

…nor, apparently, notice the Lord smiling quietly, content to let the serf indulge in the belief in his self-sufficiency …

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

I ask God the Spirit. “Can you taste this fine beef stew, this incomperable rum?” I hear nothing. I ask, “Can you feel the silk of this woman's skin?” I hear nothing. I ask, “What good are you anyway?”

I hear nothing.

——————————————————-

The fine beef stew, the incomparable rum, and the silk of this woman's skin are already divine.

The steer that dies for your meal, the artisans who distill and bottle that delightful rum, and the skin that feels the silk of another's skin are all holy. Wholly.

So why these askings? If God / Spirit/ Being [insert your preferred word, or no word at all, here] savors these delights through and with and in us, the questions are moot.

Besides, God prefers to answer a question with silence. It's Spirit's first language.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Hi Mary,

To make make attributions of divinity or holiness, or address by any of the thousand names of God, the wholly all of this, seems to me to be gilding the lily. It might even be hubris trying to humble  itself.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

“It might even be hubris trying to humble itself.”

Whoa; that statement gives me something to ponder!

But I guess my current thinking is that we (or at least I) usually don't recognize what wild grace there is in the most seemingly ordinary things: the exquisite and unfathomable mystery of a humble ungilded lily. Or the stew, or the rum, or the caress …. or existence or being itself.

In other words: defining any of the “all of this” as God  would be hubris. Or idolatry. Pointing to “this” or “that” as divine or holy isn't, imo. It's a way of saying: Behold this emanation, this manifestation of Spirit (or Whatever)! Taste this drop of the love-flood!

It's in part an expression of deep gratitude, and – honestly – awe and confoundment, when it comes to “all of this.”

And (I hope) …. of humility stepping fully into itself.

(Oops! I've just failed postmetaphysical theology!!)

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Mary,

You wrote: Pointing to “this” or “that” as divine or holy isn't, imo. It's a way of saying: Behold this emanation, this manifestation of Spirit (or Whatever)!

And I can understand the point and thereby understand why you also wrote: (Oops! I've just failed postmetaphysical theology!!)

But that also means that you didn't flunk plain old theology. I can appreciate this because if I were a spiritually inclined man I would much rather identify with a plain old God, I might even be some kind of pagan, for such Gods have so much more heart (in the sense of courage, will, penache,) than the compromised and constructed wussy dieties of the retreating horizon.

More on the implications of this later in the day…

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Balder,

…nor, apparently, notice the Lord smiling quietly, content to let the serf indulge in the belief in his self-sufficiency …

Is this the answer you got when you asked the question, “What would Jerry Falwell say?” ;-)

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

LOL.  Yep.  There's an enjoyable, smug power available in such a voice.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Mary,

You wrote: In other words: defining any of the “all of this” as God  would be hubris. Or idolatry. Pointing to “this” or “that” as divine or holy isn't, imo. It's a way of saying: Behold this emanation, this manifestation of Spirit (or Whatever)! Taste this drop of the love-flood!

The other day while searching through old files I found a lost ms word copy of a 2006 Naked Lunch, or Integral Naked or Something Naked post that turned out to be one of Marianthi's favorites from way back. I was reminded of it by your quote above because you hint at most of its elements and condense the bulk of it into that juicy love-flood sentence. Anyway, I was encouraged to dress it up a little and re-post it as a circumlocutious and quasi-Sufi-subtle way to illustrate the landscape seen from here.

I know that I first encountered you and Balder, and possibly other readers, on Int. Naked and you might recalled that DavidD, always a good straight man, would spin out some kind of earnest thread on the practice of newage rapture or some such and I would recite a couple of stories about nondual kundalini activating ecstasies (K Events)that I have known and loved. Perhaps you don't recall, but that doesn't matter.  But I did not find it strange that no one else ever responded in kind. Either everyone was too reticent or shy or private to share or else they never went there.  So over the years I have concluded that I have experienced such things more often than anyone else I have known. And that was the surprise because I have been known to hang with a lot of mystics.

The K Events started when I was 15 or 16 in a non-sexual, spontaneous coming of age situation. I believe it was Loren Eiseley who once wrote that in a rite of passage, whether ritualized or not, “the boy becomes a man and the man sees god.” which would have been true no doubt if I had come from a culture that held rite of passage ecstasies in high esteem to the extent that I would have known before hand that if the vision came that vision would be of god. Luckily I was spared all of that. As a result I just got the bare bones, stripped of interpreted features, shorn of myth…as if that were not enough to have the entire universe, or at least my momentary take on it, change in every way I could envision. And it continued to do so with every subsequent experience: the texture of the air changed…like cheese cloth transformed to brocade silk, as did the cascading colors of it all, and the weight and dimension of my body, the nature of sound and the velocity of this illusion called time in which everything moves together with such precision that if I could have distinguished any seams in the environment they would have been seams with an over riding messianic cause. And these were just a fraction of the effects. Energy rose from just below the hips, fired all the chakras with dense cool flames, stretched the body, exploded in the heart, freed the lungs of all constrictions so the next breath had infinite capacity. And those were just a fraction. The real wonders were the languages I learned at every turn of my head and just as rapidly and essentially forgot, the volumes of wisdom that were written in an instant and then instantly hidden away–just a fraction.

I never went there through meditation, it never worked and I would not have trusted it if it had. Meditation was too much like self-hypnosis–my first form of meditation that dated back at least two years before the first K Event. I would not trust mediated…meditated…nonduality for the same reason I distrust the veracity of the effects of “transpersonal” (really big) doses of MDMA. There is an essence within those constructions that is built on a lie in the sense that any mention of an essence is a lie.

I am a sensualist and I like living deep in the kind of raw world to which I can trust my life. When a nondual experience arises out of a worldly situation I trust it is giving my consciousness the most profound sense of reality it can absorb, a perception of the absolute immediate reality of all that can be perceived in a harmony of moment, place, process, action, identity, relations and cohesion. I know that I have forgotten more than I can remember from the composite K Event list, but I recall a few: walking into a freezing, wind torn sunset at what seemed like the end of the world, the first listening to the ballet music for Daphnis et Chloe, ten hours of stalking an elk, running damp streets at dawn in Washington DC, realizing a guiding, life-long truth when hitchhiking  east out of Flagstaff at the age of 17, realizing the liberating value of abject insignificance on a road in southeastern Wyoming, waiting for a gunfight outside Ruidoso, NM, doing shamanic energized healing, racing horses, racing cars, driving a far too tiny boat through far too great big water when one second finds me in paralyzing terror of a standing wave that I cannot see around, or see over because I can see nothing save all that thick brown river and dirty white foam curling back down over me, but the next second I am assured that I am immortal, that mistakes are impossible, I can read every molecule of water in that wave, velocity slows to none at all and gives me the privilege of doing all I need to do…effort not a question. The entire universe changes and all that happened before, all the happened two paragraphs above happens again and I am assured that if I am not immortal it will not make a shred of difference.

The other things I trust explicitly are dreams. I have awakened with a dream image set perfectly before my eyes and in a full state of nondual awareness. In fact one such dream and the awareness that arose from it prompted me to spend about five years trying to create a unified field theory of everything human not unlike Ken Wilber's attempts to do the same. I quite that fool's pursuit when I realized with almost perfect certainty that the image…and it is a single condensed and comprehensive image…that I thought I was drawing of the human universe was nothing but the image of my own psyche. And I suspect the same of Wilber's work.

I am a sensualist, not a thinker, nor a spiritualist thinker…they call them theologians, right?  I do not hold with anything that has to do with any aspect of what could be called The Spirit, or The Divine or any of the 1,000 names of God. I have no superstitions about these nondual things, but I do have a theory that has everything to do with integral, but not the academic theological/philosophical Integral, but the commonly sensed, at-hand integral.

Until my participation in Int. Naked compelled me to research Wilberismo and all its minor correlated tangents I had not read much except poetry for years. When I was first informed of the apparently pressing need for an Integral philosophy and that Wilber was slaving away on books and lectures to prove there was such a thing and that any account of the universe had to meet the requirements he had set for such efforts, I had to wonder, “Why?” Why develop a theory as to everything being integrated, and develop a compulsive punch-list of necessaries for entry into Integral Consciousness, when anyone with half a set of senses and a shred of instinct on how to use them can know with near perfect certainty that integral reality is plainly, manifestly, there to be known, and if reasonably known, easily navigated. It exists complete and perfect on the dimensionless leading point of now when all that is within one's sphere manifests into perception, including the perceiver, and cascades into the spherical, also dimensionless veil of the senses as a perfectly integrated instantaneous pattern between potential and entropy, a seamless and fleeting 15 billion-year-old legacy of what even the pathetically stupid genius of Mullah Nasrudin called “intertwined events” (as opposed to cause and effect). And despite the perception that this pattern is dimensionless in the illusion of time and the fullness of space does not mean that it does not have structural integrity (all things on either or all sides of it have none) nor does that integrity mean there is anything determined or intelligently designed about it. (Both of those concepts are the artifacts of dualistic thought and the desperate safety-seeking of anthropocentric projection,) There is an accidental, extemporaneous (outside of time) and random quality to this pattern like that of the patterns of colored shards of glass tumbling past the mirrors and prisms of a kaleidoscope where, within it, or within the pattern of the universe the integration is complete to the ultimate point that this integration is no longer of conscious consideration. The universe changes within the standards of perception to constrain itself within the instant because the perceiver is no longer drawing back to perceive, but is absorbed, balanced and upright in its tiny, insignificant vessel, integrated…integral. Real.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Hi again Steven –

You wrote –

I know that I first encountered you and Balder, and possibly other readers, on Int. Naked and you might recalled that DavidD, always a good straight man, would spin out some kind of earnest thread on the practice of newage rapture or some such and I would recite a couple of stories about nondual kundalini activating ecstasies (K Events)that I have known and loved. Perhaps you don't recall, but that doesn't matter.  But I did not find it strange that no one else ever responded in kind. Either everyone was too reticent or shy or private to share or else they never went there.  So over the years I have concluded that I have experienced such things more often than anyone else I have known. And that was the surprise because I have been known to hang with a lot of mystics.

Indeed I do recall your Integral Naked (Lunch) writings – maybe not this particular one in which you discuss your K awakenings – but many other of your provocative yarns, galloping descriptions and teeth-in-flesh philosophizings, full of adventure and poetry and good humor. I think that you and Balder and a few others encountered a similar “lack of response” effect there – with your postings often being so full and complete and refined that many folks may have felt too …. blown away to say anything as follow-up – or they could have thought that there was really nothing else to say after such tomes.

And as far as I know, sudden spontaneous K awakenings such as you've described are uncommon (esp in the West) – thus few of us here can really relate – I certainly cannot, although I love hearing accounts of these experiences. On occasion I still savor just sitting and wondering about the wildness and mystery of it all!

Such an crushing awakening out of the blue, “shorn of myth” and pre-fab interpretations, cannot help but set you on a different trajectory than I, who was born steeped in myth – purely an accident of birth and culture. Partly because of this accident of my birth, I cannot help but read your description and think: wow, what a profound rush and flow of Spirit …. such language seems embedded bone-deep in my being – even during the 20 years of my life when I staunchly rejected any of the “G” and “S” and “D” words – those words and stories never really “left” me. And now (on a good day, at least) “Spirit” feels as obvious to me as gravity or sunlight on my skin…
 
I recall a writer – don't remember who – once saying that atheism was simply a failure of the poetic imagination – an inability or unwillingness to perceive the world's mythic symbols dancing within our individual and collective experiences. I don't know if I really agree with that (because I know some wonderfully imaginative nontheist poets!) but it does seem that we get all tangled and messed up by language and signs, by the words we use in our attempt to point out what's happening…. And yet in the end ithe words don't really matter, do they? Because here we all are, connected and interconnected for better or for worse in this wild woolly existence no matter what terms we put to it.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Mary,

Thanks so much.

Well said and I deeply resonated with your musings.

Cheers,
Doug

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Cameron has posted more thoughts on postmetaphysical theology here, in a new Integral Life blog.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Hi Balder, thanks for posting a link to Cameron's essay.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

For interested members:  Cameron has posted another Caputo-inspired blog on Integral Life.

Jesus and the Poetics of the Impossible

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

“Suzuki famously never claimed to be enlightened or to have realized kensho or satori, and in fact he is known to have denied that he was enlightened, which is to say that he never placed himself on “the throne of the divine.” Many people who knew him have remarked about his apparently genuine humility.”

“Christ is the perfect man who is crucified.”

Well, apparently Cameron is experiencing his own dose of genuine humility and may be in the process of crucifying himself:

CamFession: An Apology

Who knows, maybe Cam will transform himself into a poet of the possible…